Watching King Lear is the bleakest possible way to spend three hours – so why do I keep doing it?

There is presently no finer Shakespearean stage actor than Simon Russell Beale

When I was thirteen, I watched the 1983 Granada TV production of King Lear, with Laurence Olivier in the title role. It’s sometimes said that by the time you’re old enough to play Lear you’re too old to play him, and Olivier proved the adage both ways. He had acted the part on stage in 1946, when he was still in his thirties. Now, in the last major performance of his life, palpably frail, he could no longer bring the necessary sense of movement, of degeneration, to the role. We saw the foolish fond old man alright (“in the end, we are all King Lear”, observed Goethe in what may be the single most depressing line in the whole of European literature); but we caught no glimpse in the earlier scenes of the domineering king who, unlike most of the audience, has no idea of what is in store for him.

What I most recall about that performance was the reaction of my English teacher, who was showing it to us as a class video. Sitting at the back of the room, and thinking himself unobserved, he began to weep. As Act 5 unfolded, he pulled out his handkerchief and mopped away freely. Few thirteen-year-old boys are moved to tears by videos, but I remember thinking then that there was something special about a play that could so affect a man who, being an English teacher, must have read it before dozens of times.

Now I, too, find myself pulled back again and again to that almost unbearable tragedy. A first-rate performance can leave me feeling drained for days afterwards. Simon Russell Bealeis currently playing the king at the National Theatre and, as in all his roles, has given a great deal of thought to how his character develops during the action. For the play to work, the audience must get a sense of Lear’s decline from dictator to dotard. We have to believe that he senses it, too, otherwise his rages lack pathos. The best Lears are those who, like Meryl Streep in her brilliant portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, convey their inner awareness of, and frustration with, what is happening to them: “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind”.

Adrian Hilton is a seasoned Shakespearean, who once recited the plays without a break for the Guinness Book of World Records. He and I often discourse on Twitter through quotations from the canon but, more recently, he took issue with the current NT production – specifically with the director’s decision to have the mad king batter his Fool to presumed death. For Adrian, the attack wrecked the balance of the whole drama, which depends upon Lear being “more sinn’d against than sinning”.

How different are the takes that any two people will have on the same Shakespeare play. To me, the essence of King Lear is that there is no balance, no karma, nothing. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods. They kill us for their sport.” The lines where Lear is raving insanely – and which are often now trimmed for space – sing of a terrifying, amoral universe, with the Fool’s musings about slanders living in tongues and bawds building churches serving as a kind of eerie, minor-key descant.

The horror reaches cosmic proportions in the dialogue between Lear and Gloucester at the foot of the cliff.

Lear: Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?

Gloucester: Ay, sir.

Lear: And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office. Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back. Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind for which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

For George Orwell, these lines were veiled social criticism. The king, he believed, spoke sense only when raving; “in his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark.” But I think it’s worse than that. Mad Lear is telling blind Gloucester that what they have suffered is unremarkable: the universe is vast, cruel and capricious. There is no justice.

I watched the current production sitting next to someone who was seeing it for the first time. I sensed her flinching as Lear pronounced his monstrous curse on Goneril (“If she must teem, create her child of spleen, that it may live and be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her…”) and, somehow, her reaction made me watch the rest of the play as if it were fresh. Familiarity with the ending can dull us to its unutterable horror. But now I perceived, as new, the awful art of the final act. Edmund and Edgar fight a duel; the best man wins. We take it as a sign that there may be some moral order in the universe after all. So does Edgar: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us.” We think that Lear and Cordelia will live out their remaining days together. But the poet has simply been softening us up for his final cut. As an incredulous Samuel Johnson put it:

Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles.

The dyspeptic doctor was so upset that he never read the final scenes again until he had to as an editor. Indeed, for decades, the play was given an altered, happy ending, and you can see why. Next to King Lear, Schindler’s List is positively jaunty: Steven Spielberg, understanding the rules of drama, gave us a little ray of optimism at the end. Not so our national poet. With the possible exception of Measure for Measure, no work is so powerful and at the same time so unremittingly black.

A fine performance of Lear triggers catharsis, in the exact sense meant by Greek tragedians. We leave the theatre emptier, purer, sadder, wiser. And we know that, despite everything, we’ll be back.